URLs du Jour

■ We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming, with
Proverbs 28:27:

Those who give to the poor will lack nothing, but those who close
their eyes to them receive many curses.

Again with the poor. (Yes, when I read the Old Testament, I can
come off sounding a tad Jewish.) Allow me to share a paragraph from
P. J. O'Rourke's latest book
How the Hell Did This
Happen?:

In 1966, at the height of Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty," the
U.S. poverty rate was 14.7% and 28.5 million Americans were living
in poverty. Now the U.S. poverty rate is 14.5% and 45 million
Americans are living in poverty. Thus
Democratic politicians care so much about poverty that—far from warring
on it—they have become a kind of conservationist group, devoted to preserving it forever. Democrats are the Sierra Club of Poverty.

I have to go with P. J. over Proverbs.

■ NR's Kevin D. Williamson sounds the alert: Here
Come the Pizza Gestapo. At issue: the new federal restaurant regulations
that demand "posting signs in the shop with calorie counts for every
item on the menu and for every variation on that item." Yes,
even at Domino's, where the vast majority of orders are placed
not "in the shop", but over phone and Internet. And where
there are (you may be aware) myriads of different combinations of
pizza toppings.
And nobody
pays attentions to calorie counts "in the shop" anyway.

So: useless and expensive. But:

But Uncle Stupid is dead serious about this: Violating the new
federal pizza rules is not a civil offense but a criminal one. A pimply-faced teen-ager who throws an extra handful of cheese onto a large Cali Chicken Bacon Ranch pizza could be thrown in the federal lockup for a year.

There's been a lot of
whining
about Trump's proposed FDA budget cuts, but obviously he didn't cut
enough.

If you lean left—even if you adhere to the campus orthodoxy, or to
certain elements of it—you might consider how the failure to respect
pluralism puts your own convictions at risk of a backlash. “People are
sick and tired of being called racist for innocent things they’ve said
or done,” Mr. Haidt observes. “The response to being called a racist
unfairly is never to say, ‘Gee, what did I do that led to me being
called this? I should be more careful.’ The response is almost always,
‘[Expletive] you!’ ”

He offers this real-world example: “I think that the ‘deplorables’ comment could well have changed the course of human history.”

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